This post is going to ramble a bit LOL. I was enjoying doing some pinning on Salted Egg Yolks, seeing if there was anything new and funky looking at it from a world wide point of view.. which lapsed me into looking at food and pantries..

Which lead me to Deep Pantry posts.. O my, why O WHY does everyone think they need to put a new label on something that has been used for hundreds of years, its called a fully stocked larder, a full stocked Root Cellar or more modern a pantry..

So I did a little more digging on this “new Term” and I finally got why the split..

a) Deep Pantry -is somehow connected to the prepping world, it means that you are stocking extra food for in times of need to come. I am honestly not sure why they felt they needed their own lingo or name for this.

b) Stocked Larder is more based on history and more about putting away in the good years to have stocks and stores in the lean years.. (ok, that’s been a goal for leaders, countries and anyone who could afford to do so for a few thousand years!)

Which brings me to Homesteaders, the permaculture movement, the community garden’s, to the massive green-growing-local food movement..

We talk about canning pantry’s, we talk about root cellars, and root clamps, we talk about food forests and swells and how to collect and clean our rain water, we teach classes, share seeds, share garden projects, we teach how to do hand on in so many ways, we build and help bring gardens to schools and more..

But what do we call a “stocked or deep pantry”.. I really needed to think about this.. we typically call it our pantry, or root cellar or to tell the truth many of us do use the terms Larder but others say just say cellar

Bottom line those of use that live on the land, work the land and who truly make a massive effort to feed ourselves year round know that we need a min of two years worth of food basic’s put up.. because at any time, on any year crops can and will fail..

Our Pantries look so different what I see on the net, no pretty rows of buckets, no shelves full of colorful cans and rows of store got paper towels and so forth on the top rows..

We are much more likely to have large jars full of dried goods, freezers full of meat-veggies and fruit- shelves full of colorful canned goods, everything from grape juice to apple sauce to all kinds of veggies and pickles, jams, jellies and rows of canned meats, soups, stews and so forth..

We are likely to have stacked milk crates and old slapped together wooden box’s for all kinds of root veggies, we will have old onion bags hanging off the roof, we will have squash tucked away in all kinds of crazy places in our house, and we will slowly eat them, and we will dry or can or freeze the leftovers when we cut into and open a big squash and after its been held for 6 to 9 months, we will see how it held, taste it and decide if its worthy to pass its genetics on to the next generations.

yes, we will still buy things from the store, but only after we have looked for local u-picks, local farm gate sales but we will work each year to do so less and less, and we will find ourselves giving things up when they finished and moving over to something else in the lauder to use up, because after all the time, effort, work we have put into it, why would we want to waste.

I am mulling over it, I have a lot of data over the years on what to grow for X amount of return and how it can be used in my more closed loop homestead system, I am not going to even consider adding in a “stock” the lauder weekly recommends but I think I will consider adding comments to the planned monthly garden round up posts, as well as the canning log post.. and we will see what the monthly results round up to in order to give us info in regards to the full year.

Are you old school, do you split the different things into what they are in fact called, do you use a general name to cover them all, do you use a older more history term for it, or do you just call it the pantry or the cellar or do you use the more modern terms.. Deep Pantry?

12 Responses to Homestead Pantry Log 2017

[J] Larder is a place where raw food, especially meat, is kept: in Scotland we talk of the deer brought back from the stalking is kept in a deer-larder. Pantry is a small store usually off the kitchen for keeping all sorts of provisions, but with an emphasis on having been processed in some way – whether preserved or salted, or cooked and ready to eat. I can’t see that a larder can be ‘deep’ in the sense of providing for more than a winter ahead, because it’s for raw food. However a pantry can be. These days a pantry could be just one or more cupboards in the kitchen itself – a notional pantry, as it were. A huge climate-controlled pantry is still a pantry, no matter how deep it goes (metaphorically or literally!).

I have a ‘canning room’. It’s a room on the east side of the house (only place I can put it) and I can control the temp with a window if I keep the door closed. Heating with wood makes the house too warm to store much food – but this room works. This room also stores most everything I need for food prep (canners etc), cheese making equipment, soap making supplies and so on. I still need more shelving in it though. My freezers are in a room on the north side of the house, my fridge and another small freezer are on an enclosed porch nextbto the canning room. Come to think of it – most of my wee house is planned/organized around food storage/prep. 😊

This is a comment from one of my facebook readers and it was just to go not to share here on the comment section.

Funny, and I guess it’s regional, too. The ones like Cookie say “deep pantry” and that’s exactly what it is – it’s a bigger, deeper pantry than the cupboards and little skinny, shallow thing, or it’s a whole little room. Because you use it for the bulk stuff, bring up your dry and canned stuff to where you can grab them easier, and there’s not room in those shallow “normal” cabinets – or shelf strength – for ALL of them. – – – – When she says larder, she means maybe the same thing, but she’s probably talking about where apples or potatoes live (separately), and the room-temp solid-soft fats, or a smoked-meat dried-meat space. I guess she learned to say larder after they left the “country” because her “my girlhood” stories talk about a springhouse. – – – And her cellar is just that – down, deep, thick, for squash and sweets and some of the other stuff that’s heat sensitive or the higher-moisture stuff in tubs and baskets like carrots. – – – A lot of the older-timers I’ve run into seem to have the same divides, and the ones who DO grow a ton, keep some selection out where it’s easier (maybe because of modern kitchen design?) instead of always walking to that bigger space or down to the basement. 🙂 Neat thoughts for the day, and now I have to pay more attention to see what else has different names, or names that get used differently by people and cultures and mindsets.

Squash are still held under the bed, just as they were in my grandmother and parents’ houses, as it’s cooler upstairs than the rest of the house, but still nice and dry… There was also a root cellar for storing (yes root vegetables; ) like potatoes in their sacks; carrots, parsnips and turnips layered in old honey boxes filled with damp sand; onions and garlic hung high and dry in braids or net bags under the store-room stairs, right along side all of the shelves of dry goods and rows of Bernardin glass canning jars.

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